The broadcast and digital journalism (BDJ) program has a 40-credit curriculum that begins the week after the July Fourth holiday and ends in August of the following year.

It starts with our summer Boot Camp. You’ll learn how to write for the ear, to report what your audience needs and wants to know and to tell your stories in interesting ways via multiple platforms.

Here’s something important: Starting your first summer with us and throughout your time at Newhouse, you will be sent repeatedly into the field to report on real stories that will be both pre-packaged and presented live.

Repetitive experiences in telling stories in multiple electronic formats—recorded and live—are essential to your growth as a journalist. You can’t do this only a few times and be job-ready.

It’s also worth emphasizing that throughout your time at Newhouse, you’ll be telling stories on multiple platforms. You’ll be tweeting news from the field before you tackle your broadcast story. You’ll also be posting online with text, visuals and sound before you call it a wrap.

Besides reporting, your professional classes will focus on producing (both for the newscast and in the field), performance (field and studio), anchoring, management, newsroom operations and digital news opportunities.

Your Newhouse master's degree also requires you to understand communications law, ponder ethical challenges and understand the role research plays in journalism.

Additionally, Newhouse requires an internship of our BDJ grad students. Those internships may be in news, sports or other areas of journalism, in local operations during the academic semesters or at national operations during winter break. For example, during Winter Break 2010, five graduate students interned at KABC-TV in Los Angeles and two learned the ropes at NBC News in New York City. The word we heard most frequently from these students in describing their internships was “amazing.”

You finish the program with your capstone experience. First, you will be producing two daily newscasts on deadline. You’ll rotate through every newsroom job. Then it’s off to the nation’s capital for the last summer session to report, produce, shoot, edit, blog, tweet and meet in-person some of Washington’s finest journalists and most interesting newsmakers.